PART I
CHAPTER 1
Despite the precipitous decline of its industrial base in the latter part of the twentieth century, Baltimore attracted national attention repeatedly for appearing to have reinvented itself sufficiently to restore the promise that had attracted generations of migrants—Black as well as white—to its distinctive row-house neighborhoods. A robust campaign against blight in the 1950s gave new hope to bold concepts of urban renewal. The subsequent redevelopment of a tawdry downtown as a formidable assemblage of offices and hotels called the Charles Center gave new life to the city core. The conversion of the Inner Harbor to a tourism destination and the opening of the Orioles and Ravens sports complexes further highlighted the city as a destination. A robust collaboration to revitalize the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood on the city’s West Side and subsequent redevelopment on the East Side instigated by Johns Hopkins Hospital, promised that revitalization would not be confined downtown. Even the intractable issue of access to affordable housing appeared to have been addressed when a landmark court case assured poor residents confined to deteriorating public housing projects that they would gain access to better opportunities in the suburbs as well as other parts of the city. Baltimore took every step deemed necessary to make itself a location of opportunity for Freddie Gray as much as anyone else. And yet, with Gray’s death and the violence that followed, one could be forgiven for feeling so little had changed since the riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination half a century earlier.
The Mondawmin Mall is about an eight-minute drive from the Gilmor Homes, the public housing complex where Freddie Gray grew up in the Sandtown-Winchester neighborhood. Two days after Gray’s death from spinal cord injuries incurred while being transported to jail for allegedly possessing an illegal knife, a group of young African Americans exiting the Mondawmin subway stop were confronted by a phalanx of police, alerted by rumors of possible disturbances at the site. Raw sentiment in the aftermath of another highly publicized and controversial death of a Black man in police custody, combined with the scuffles that resulted as mallgoers exited from the subway, led first to physical clashes with the police and subsequently to looting.1 The disturbances, which left twenty-four police officers injured and some two dozen buildings burned, quickly became the fodder of political commentary, drawing further criticism of police practice from the left and angry denunciations of looters from the right. Virtuously anonymous in life, Gray’s tragic death loomed over the city and nation for months, a clear sign of the failures to resolve the inequities and pain associated with big-city racial segregation so forcefully stated nearly fifty years earlier by the Kerner Commission report. Clearly, Baltimore, like so many other metropolitan areas remained, in the commission’s words, “two societies, one Black, one white—separate and unequal.”2
Born in 1990, Gray was too young to appreciate the widely praised revitalization efforts directed at his neighborhood in the years immediately before and after his birth. He certainly was not aware of the catalytic effect the Mondawmin Mall had had on Baltimore when it first opened in 1956. Undoubtedly he never met Mondawmin’s developer, James Rouse, who died in 1996, either. But their lives were nonetheless interrelated, and it was a further tragedy that as much as Rouse did to help revitalize Sandtown, his efforts could not make Freddie Gray’s life better, let alone save him from unnecessary death.
Mondawmin was James Rouse’s first shopping center development. Located three miles from Baltimore’s downtown, it aimed to serve a burgeoning suburban clientele. In doing so, the mall sparked sufficient excitement to launch the mortgage banker Rouse on a new career developing regional shopping centers. Intended to serve as anchors to communities, not just generators of revenue, these malls quickly succeeded in draining commercial vitality from historic downtown shopping areas, further undercutting the finances and functions of central cities as human and monetary capital fled to the suburbs. Chastened by what he had helped create, Rouse brought the regional shopping center concept back to the city center, first most famously in the revitalization of Boston’s Quincy Market, then a few miles away from Mondawmin in Baltimore’s Inner Harbor, clearly the city’s most acclaimed financial success in a period of rapid industrial decline. A deeply religious man, Rouse through his association with the Church of the Saviour’s work in providing affordable housing in Washington, D.C., came to the view that “all low-income people in the US should have the opportunity for fit and affordable housing within a generation, and to move up and out of poverty into the mainstream of American life.” Acting on his faith, Rouse widened the scope of his business interests to form the Enterprise Foundation in 1982 with the intent of plowing profits aggregated from his commercial successes back into impoverished city neighborhoods. Following an era of controversial urban renewal efforts, which he had helped spur as a central adviser in the crafting of the National Housing Act of 1954, Rouse was determined to learn from the past by making the communities he sought to support full partners in their own redevelopment. Sandtown-Winchester was anticipated to be the most complete test to date of the robust public-private partnership he envisioned.3
Sandtown’s redevelopment followed the election of Baltimore’s first Black mayor, Kurt Schmoke. Educated at Yale in the latter part of the 1960s, where he was head of the Black Student Alliance and subsequently a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford, Schmoke made a commitment to rebuild the deteriorated Sandtown area during his 1987 election campaign in response to a progressive community-building effort initiated by Baltimoreans United in Leadership Development (BUILD), a faith-based coalition affiliated with the Industrial Areas Foundation originally formed by Chicago’s Saul Alinsky in 1940. With BUILD as the primary community partner, Schmoke, in cooperation with the Enterprise Foundation, launched a two-year planning process to determine what the highest priorities might be to achieve “neighborhood transformation.” The effort culminated in a plan endorsed in a March 1993 meeting of two hundred neighborhood residents to advance not just access to decent and affordable housing but initiatives aimed at empowering residents through employment, education, and health services outreach. According to a flyer the Enterprise Foundation produced on the effort, the foundation bore the responsibility for facilitating the process, “bringing together government, private agencies, and community organizations in productive working relationships.” A new nonprofit organization, Community Building in Partnership, a majority of whose board was composed of neighborhood residents, was named to serve with city officials while Enterprise representatives assumed day-to-day management.4
With Schmoke doing his share of directing public resources to the target area, other public initiatives followed, including a 1994 Compact Schools agreement to improve student achievement through curriculum reform and increased parental involvement. The creation of a homeownership zone funded by the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1997 attracted another $30 million in funding and increased home ownership from 24 to 32.6 percent. Almost six hundred units of Gilmor Homes were modernized in the early 1990s, and in April 1997 the facility was selected as a demonstration site for the city’s Jobs Plus initiative, a program aimed at dramatically increasing the number of people employed by providing job training, support services, and linkages with businesses. According to an Enterprise Foundation summary of the effort, Community Building in Partnership’s employment center, Sandtown Works, was to collaborate with Empowerment Zone partners “to design a comprehensive approach to employment in the neighborhood, using assessment, readiness and skills training, placement, follow-up support, and self-employment.”5 Through the year 2000, seven hundred houses and apartments had been built or renovated in the neighborhood, and the Sandtown initiative had drawn more than $130 million in public and private funds for its transformation.6 While the initiative depended on the buy-in of neighborhood residents—and not everyone participated whether because of hardship or ongoing skepticism about the project—Robert Halpern’s leading study of community development at the time could nonetheless single out Sandtown as “successful in involving community residents in planning and implementation.”7
Even though the Enterprise initiative happened in Gray’s lifetime, the community at the time of his death was far from what Rouse had envisioned. Once a thriving portion of Baltimore’s West Side Black community, the home of singer Cab Calloway and US Supreme Court Justice Thurgood Marshall, among others, by 2015, nearly half the working-age population of some ten thousand residents was unemployed or working only in occasional jobs. More than half its households survived on less than $60,000 a year. The area had roughly double the city’s rate of unemployment, poverty, homicides, and shootings. Lead-paint violations were four times the city average, as was the percentage of vacant buildings.8 Growing up in poor housing conditions himself, Gray was exposed early to lead paint, according to a deposition filed by his mother, Gloria Darden, in 2009. Never having completed high school, she admitted to having a heroin habit before receiving treatment. Troubled by attention disorder, most likely a product of his exposure to lead, Gray fared badly in school and spent several years in jail before his arrest in 2015. He learned masonry skills during his incarceration but found he could not gain access to an apprentice program in construction because of his criminal record. At the time of his death, he was living in the Gilmor Homes in a unit occupied by his sisters. Baltimore’s public housing had itself been the target of a civil rights lawsuit, and Gilmor, it was charged, had been prey to a pattern of abuse as maintenance workers demanded sex in return for repairs.9 What had happened to this community during the years Freddie was growing up?
Figure 1. Freddie Gray mural by Nether (Justin Nethercot), at North Mount and Presbury Streets, Sandtown-Winchester, near where Gray was arrested. Gray is flanked by civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr., Rosa Parks, and Thurgood Marshall on one side and contemporary protesters under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement on the other. Jahi Chikwendiu, Washington Post. Getty Images, with permission.
The short answer, offered at the time of Gray’s death, was that Jim Rouse was no longer around to press the case for Sandtown. Indeed, a thorough assessment of Baltimore’s community development efforts published in 2015 noted that city officials, responding to criticism that Sandtown had been favored at the expense of other neighborhoods, no longer targeted the neighborhood as the beneficiary of special public investment in the 2000s.10 But the Sandtown initiative suffered internal problems as well. A central partner in the effort, BUILD wanted to see local residents trained to fight politically for their economic security. Instead, as the initiative continued to emphasize bricks and mortar, BUILD dropped its partnership with the Enterprise Foundation to focus on citywide economic issues. That left Enterprise, according to one report, more attuned to securing financing than fostering a leadership cadre. By 1997, Community Building in Partnership was responding with an active outreach effort, but for many who invested hopes in community building itself, the effort was too little and too late.11 The most comprehensive assessment came in 2013 from the Baltimore-based Abell Foundation on the twentieth anniversary of the transformation initiative. Comparing Sandtown with two other nearby neighborhoods and with the city as a whole, two university-based scholars found only modest gains in home ownership and in alleviating poverty. Overall, they found persistent ill effects in a neighborhood that remained overwhelmingly Black and poor. Performance on statewide tests continued to lag despite the intervention of the Compact Schools agreement. While crime dropped at about the same rate as it did elsewhere in the city, it nonetheless remained very high. Life expectancy, at sixty-five, was six to seven years shorter than the city average. Such findings, the researchers concluded, “point to the difficulties of overcoming the overlapping disadvantages that accrue in poor and segregated neighborhoods, even with ample resources and, as in the case of Sandtown-Winchester, in full partnership with community members.”12 Those “overlapping disadvantages” were a long time in the making. As Michael Barb, an official of Habitat for Humanity and a Sandtown resident put it at the time of the disturbances following Gray’s death, questioning the focus on past investments, “As if any dollar amount can be identified as the amount necessary to unravel a couple of hundred years of racism and oppression. Whether people want to talk about it or not, that’s where we are today.”13
Baltimore’s history of racial segregation went back centuries, but the modern challenge to the converging effects of disinvestment and racial exclusion dated from the immediate post–World War II years, in early efforts to reverse physical decline as it compromised the city’s poorest residential quarters. Embracing the cause of fighting blight in such areas, the city undertook an aggressive neighborhood-oriented campaign to rehabilitate existing housing through strict enforcement of its housing codes. Asked in 1947 to join the effort as head of an advisory committee to the city’s Bureau of Housing, James Rouse asserted the need to combine social with physical renewal in order to uplift the spirits as well as the physical conditions of an entire neighborhood. Anticipating the approach he later took in Sandtown-Winchester, Rouse called for a pilot program “which would bring to bear on an entire neighborhood the full combination of forces available to the City—law enforcement, education, [and] recreation—with the fullest possible participation by the people in the neighborhood and by interested educational, religious and civic groups throughout the community.”14
Figure 2. Boarded-up homes in Sandtown-Winchester, 1996, when Freddie Gray was seven years old, part of the extensive dilapidated housing stock targeted for restoration as part of the revitalization effort spurred by the Enterprise Foundation in partnership with Baltimore’s first elected Black mayor, Kurt Schmoke. Alexander Garvin.
Rouse brought his experience with the Fight Blight campaign in Baltimore to a refashioning of national policy through the national Housing Act of 1954. As a member of a key subcommittee preparing draft legislation, he urged the government to go beyond the traditionally piecemeal approach to poor areas by pressing for language requiring cities to produce a “workable plan,” which, following the Baltimore model, would stress rehabilitation and conservation over slum clearance by requiring localities to design programs to “prevent the spread of slums and rehabilitate existing structures and neighborhoods.” In public testimony on behalf of the legislation, Rouse commended the shift in emphasis “from demolition projects done to the regeneration of neighborhoods and renewal of our cities.”15 Title I of the new legislation opened the way to the kind of public-private partnerships that exemplified Rouse’s professional career, by subsidizing private investors in areas the government had designated for redevelopment. Although the new legislation boosted the prospects for “renewal,” the revitalization that followed quickly descended into clearance efforts starkly in contrast with the Baltimore approach.16 The demolition of whole neighborhoods—many of them occupied by minorities in older sections of cities close to the historic downtowns—brought with them displacement, conflict, and charges that urban renewal had been devised for the purposes of Black removal.17
If Rouse brought to the legislation a Baltimore model, the city did not escape the unintended consequences of the approach. Both through renewal projects downtown and in select neighborhoods, such as Harlem Park adjacent to Sandtown-Winchester, Baltimore leveraged federal funds to clear sites for new construction. To this, they added the other planner’s tool provided for so generously through federal subsidies: highway construction. The same Downtown Committee composed of the city’s leading business figures, including Rouse, that spurred the thirty-three-acre, $180 million Charles Center urban renewal project downtown embraced the advice of its designated consultant, G. Harvey Porter. His review of other downtown revitalization efforts concluded that accessibility by private automobile on a high-speed expressway “was the key to the well-being of downtown.” Such investment, however, served less to bolster downtown than to facilitate the commuting patterns of the growing number of upwardly mobile whites who had been drawn to the suburbs in the aftermath of World War II. The planned highways were bitterly fought by residents whose homes were to be sacrificed to the new investments, resulting in some of the projects not being completed. But for those whose neighborhoods were slated for thruways, such as the Black middle-class neighborhood of Rosemont on the city’s West Side, planned destruction was as good as condemnation. After a decade of quibbling about the path of a freeway, the area had become severely blighted as residents and investment fled. As historian Emily Lieb writes, “To the people who lived in the neighborhoods slated for clearance, the expressway proposals made it clear that their homes and schools and luncheonettes and grocery stores were less important than an exit ramp. Public policy declared over and over again that Baltimore’s Black neighborhoods were disposable; in 1968 rioters treated them accordingly.”18
The riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination brought Baltimore to a critical juncture. With the city trending heavily toward an African American majority, as whites accelerated their flight from the city, the establishment that had driven renewal policy to date might well have acceded control to a rising Black leadership. Instead, according to the astute observations of former city worker Dan Sparaco, a new consensus formed based on containing and managing Black political interests for as long as possible until an orderly transition of political power from whites to Blacks could take place. This unwritten deal, he asserts, “was designed to end, not carry forward, the fight against segregated schools and housing, and the fight for transportation access and economic opportunity. The structural isolation of Black people would, by and large be left in place, and the obstacles to Black opportunity would persist right up to last April when we had to be reminded of them once again.”19
The chief agent of that consensus was William Donald Schaefer, who served as mayor of the city from 1971 to 1987. Even as he moved to end the drive for school desegregation, Schaefer effectively utilized federal funds to keep Black neighborhood leaders satisfied and in line while directing the bulk of the city’s political and economic resources to the extended buildup of the downtown.20 The widely heralded “renaissance” that followed sprang from the city’s Inner Harbor, a once vibrant industrial port that had lost its function as the city deindustrialized. Anchored by Rouse’s heavily subsidized Harborplace market, the network of restaurants, shops, and related tourist-driven activities drew immediate national attention to the point that Time graced its cover with a picture of Rouse under the title “Cities Are Fun!” As economic historian Marc V. Levine put it, “Schaefer’s audacious aim was to transform this ‘Skid Row’ into a bustling ‘carnival city’ of tourist attractions (as well as offices and stores) that would lure visitors from the suburbs and beyond. In turn, a revitalized downtown, in conjunction with strategic investments in Baltimore’s neighborhoods would be the engine reviving the city-wide economy, re-attracting and retaining middle-class residents and rejuvenating blighted neighborhoods. In short, Baltimore would hitch its fortunes to property development and tourism.”21
Figure 3. The conversion of Baltimore’s harbor to a festival marketplace, anchored by James Rouse’s Harborplace mall, had a lasting effect on Baltimore’s economy and its priorities for capitalizing on tourism and consumption in a postindustrial economy. Courtesy Visit Baltimore.
The conversion of Baltimore’s downtown seemed to make sense as the flight of industry from the city accelerated. That success extended to other nearby venues, including the new Orioles baseball stadium at Camden Yards, opened in 1992. But such investments paled compared to the loss of industry. To the 46,000 manufacturing jobs the city lost between 1950 and 1970, another 55,000 jobs disappeared over the next quarter century. By 1995, only 8 percent of Baltimore employment remained in manufacturing. Marked by a 31 percent decline in population and equally sharp losses in federal funding in the 1980s, Baltimore, by the time Kurt Schmoke had been elected mayor, lacked the resources for neighborhood reinvestment. Only the commitment of a generous philanthropist, Rouse, and a target like Sandtown-Winchester, could stir hope in a deeply troubled city.
A 1994 $100 million grant to form a federal Empowerment Zone generated renewed hope for economic rejuvenation. The formation of a quasi-public corporation, Empower Baltimore Management Corporation, helped direct new resources to six community-based nonprofit corporations, dubbed “village centers,” with a mandate to implement workforce development, family support programs, and community-level land-use and public safety plans. Sandtown formed one of the community centers and attempted to extend the revitalization effort of earlier years, but the effort collapsed in the midst of financial scandals and unstable leadership. Overall, the Clinton administration initiative failed to stem population loss, rising poverty, and a fall in median income in designated areas, confirming a judgment by Audrey McFarlane that such projects benefit business and government elites “while unfairly and unjustly playing upon the desperation of those who have no other choice.”22
Subsequent neighborhood-based initiatives focused largely on Baltimore’s East Side, most notably under the aegis of the city’s largest employer, Johns Hopkins University. Rooted initially in the Enterprise Zone experiment in the 1990s and formalized, with the support of the Annie E. Casey Foundation in 2001, the East Baltimore Development Initiative was intended to overcome years of tension between the university and its adjacent neighborhood. Addressed to eighty-eight acres troubled by pervasive blight, poverty, and a high incidence of crime—the area that served as a primary site for the widely acclaimed criminal procedure television show The Wire23—the proposed redevelopment called for the demolition of hundreds of structures and their replacement with mixed-income housing, retail, parks, a new East Baltimore Community School, and new biomedical facilities. What separated such a renewal approach from earlier redevelopment efforts were greater resources and attention to those displaced, including a generous relocation allowance, enhanced services, and job training. A community organization, Save Middle East Coalition, managed to gain some additional concessions for local residents, but their efforts fell short. Although much of the land was cleared, progress on the Hopkins Science and Technology park lagged, due in part to declining demand for biomedical research. As much hope as was put in the school as an agent for ensuring community stability through a mix of children from newly located families with those of longtime residents, it too faltered.24 A five-part series in Baltimore’s business journal the Daily Record in 2011 reported that few contracts had been issued to minority businesses and even fewer jobs had been created for East Baltimore residents.25 As many as 750 Black families were displaced with no plan to assist them to return to the neighborhood. Affirming the altered state of the area, a new 5.5-acre park featured a dog run aimed at new residents, and developers rebranded the area as Eager Park.26 As East Side native and gang member–gone–straight D. Watkins described the ongoing renewal transition, “My city is gone, my history depleted, ruined, and undocumented.… We did stupid things (there), but that was our community, the place where our social networks were birthed and then quickly dismantled. That whole block is gone. I realized that I may never see any of those people from that place again as then shirtless white guys played two-hand-touch football in a fresh park that they would never build for us—a huge Johns Hopkins logo was the backdrop stretched across a new parking garage.”27
Map 1. Baltimore Downtown and Vicinity
Among the most troubled city residents were those faced with limited incomes attempting to access decent and affordable housing and the economic resources to achieve upward mobility. With the suburbs virtually out of reach of lower-income African Americans, there was a scramble for public housing, never adequate either in numbers of units available or in quality. A new civil rights initiative attempted to move those publicly funded residents to places of greater opportunity. The prime vehicle was a lawsuit to break up public housing locations in the heart of the most devastated Black communities, places like Gilmor Homes, where Freddie Gray had been living.
Efforts to deconcentrate poverty reached back as far as the early 1990s, when the Community Assistance Network, a well-established antipoverty agency in the suburbs, sought assistance from the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Move to Opportunity program. Their approach was cautious, involving fewer than three hundred families using housing vouchers made available under a $12.2 million HUD grant. Less than 10 percent of participants had incomes below the poverty level, yet the program was widely criticized, including by Republican gubernatorial candidate Ellen Sauerberry, who described the experiment as social engineering and charged, “Once you start messing with people’s property values, you’re asking for trouble.”28 One county legislator warned in 1994 that thousands of poor Black families who needed to be “taught to bathe and how not to steal” were about to flood southeastern sections of the county. Maryland US senator Barbara Mikulski, a Democrat who had risen to prominence fighting expressways, helped eliminate funding to expand the program the same year.29
As the Move to Opportunity program lagged, the ACLU of Maryland, joined by the NAACP Legal Defense and Educational Fund, filed suit against the Department of Housing and Urban Development in 1994, charging that the location of public housing in Baltimore had over many years deepened patterns of segregation. Prompted by HUD’s HOPE VI initiative, which was tearing down high-rise public housing with the intent of replacing those units with mixed-income communities at the same location, Thompson v. HUD initiated a consent decree in 1996, allowing demolition to continue but setting up a program to disperse public housing tenants while the larger historical claims continued to be reviewed. After nearly ten years of litigation, Federal District Court judge Marvin J. Garbis held in January 2005 that HUD had violated the Fair Housing Act of 1968 by unfairly concentrating Black public housing residents in the most impoverished and segregated areas of Baltimore City. Faulting its programs for treating Baltimore as “an island reservation for use as a container for all of the poor of a contiguous region,” Judge Garbis ruled that HUD must take affirmative steps to implement an effective regional strategy for promoting fair housing opportunities for African American public housing residents throughout the Baltimore region.30
Under the ruling, HUD authorized the Baltimore Housing Mobility Program launched under the 1996 consent decree in an earlier phase of the case to continue. In the following years this program, as administered by Metropolitan Baltimore Quadel, assisted more than 1,800 families who voluntarily chose to move from public housing and other areas of deep poverty in Baltimore City to “communities of opportunity,” neighborhoods throughout Baltimore City and the surrounding region where poverty was low and better educational and economic opportunities available. Each family that chose to participate received a Housing Choice Voucher, high-quality housing and credit counseling, and support with the transition to the new neighborhood and schools. The effort received additional credibility with the release shortly after Freddie Gray’s death of a national study certifying the positive effect of mobility initiatives for children, which singled out Baltimore as a city experiencing the greatest need.31 Certainly, the Thompson ruling revived the earlier move-to-opportunity effort, but it was far from adequate to meet demand. While 75,000 people originally signed up for a chance to be put on the housing authority list, only 25,000 were selected in a lottery that allowed them to apply for the 1,000 to 1,500 vouchers given out annually. Faced with a backlist of 12,000 applicants, the nonprofit Baltimore Regional Housing Partnership, acting as administrator, early in 2017 closed further applications for housing vouchers provided under the program until 2020.32
Freddie Gray’s death revived calls for additional investments in affordable housing opportunity. Noting that the roots of injustice had a long history, two authors of a commentary in the housing advocacy journal Shelterforce urged legislators to overturn policies that had perpetuated segregation by concentrating poverty and inequality in neighborhoods like Sandtown-Winchester. “Living in high-opportunity and inclusive communities is critical,” they wrote, “because it improves the lives of families, and particularly children’s prospects, by giving them access to high-quality schools, youth programs, more positive peer group influences, reduced violence, and—due to reduced stress and greater employment—more effective parenting.”33 Reflecting the work of fellow historians on the long history of social exclusion and segregation wielded quite legally through exclusionary zoning, preferential lending policies for whites, and police enforcement of the color line before and after the adoption of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, N. D. B. Connolly urged policymakers to avoid “the language of individual failings and degenerate culture” to “help us see the daily violence of poverty.… By calling a nationwide ‘state of emergency’ on the problem of residential segregation, by devising a fairer tax structure, by investing in public space, community policing, tenants’ rights, and a government jobs program, our leaders can find a way forward.”34
Such arguments proved congenial to some key officials. Having conducted training sessions on structural racism for his staff in the month before Freddie Gray’s death, Baltimore planning director Thomas Stosur responded to the tragedy by making clear that his office would have to address frontally “a huge legacy of proactive disinvestment along racial lines.” Henceforth, the planning department would apply “an equity lens” for all programs and projects. Directed by an Equity in Planning Committee, the effort defined equity in four dimensions:
Structural Equity: What historic advantages or disadvantages have affected residents in the given community?
Procedural Equity: How are residents who have been historically excluded from planning processes being authentically included in the planning, implementation, and evaluation of the proposed policy or project?
Distributional Equity: Does the distribution of civic resources and investment explicitly account for potential racially disparate outcomes?
Transgenerational Equity: Does the policy or project result in unfair burdens on future generations?
As an example, the department partnered with Baltimore City Schools and the state in an ambitious $1 million school renovation program to develop vision plans with residents within a quarter mile of each school for improving public and privately funded improvements to public infrastructure, transportation, housing, and open space. A further initiative involved an elaborate system for recruiting and supporting local residents in the effort to map areas with limited access to quality food.35
Stosur was hardly alone in seeking equity in the aftermath of Gray’s death. Less than a month later, Baltimore mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake stepped forth to launch a new program aimed at blighted neighborhoods like the one Gray died in. Calling it the “One Baltimore Initiative,” Rawlings-Blake described the effort as “a comprehensive public-private initiative” seeking “to promote collaboration for transformative change in the city, through inclusion, accountability, transparency, and sustainability.” Promising to look beyond “short-term needs of those communities affected by our recent unrest and violence,” she pronounced the effort “an opportunity for us to focus more intensely on systemic problems that have faced our city for decades, if not generations.” The mayor’s grand vision materialized initially in January 2016 with an announcement that the city and state would team up to demolish some of the more than 16,000 estimated abandoned city homes and turn vacant properties to productive use. In a four-year partnership working under the title Creating Opportunities for Renewal and Enterprise, the state promised $75 million and the city $18.5 million to demolish as many properties as possible, focusing on half and whole blocks to maximize impact. The first grants were announced in December at the site of a planned Innovation Center, sponsored by the Mount Royal Community Development Corporation in West Baltimore not far from where Gray died.36
Despite the grand promises, not everyone embraced the initiative. Although the idea of coalescing a series of smaller community initiatives into a form recognizable as an “innovative district” emerged from West Side activists, Morgan State University’s Lawrence Brown shared a concern voiced by other area residents that such goals were not aimed at their particular circumstances. Why, he asked, “is there a rush to build an ‘Innovation Village’ in West Baltimore when people are being kicked out of their neighborhoods/villages due to tax lien foreclosures, rental evictions and predatory lending? Why does an ‘Innovation Village’ take precedent before abolishing lead poison in West Baltimore, expanding Safe Streets to slow homicides, or boost grassroots efforts to prevent opioid overdoses? Who decided that building a tech village was more important than saving Black lives? How many low-income Black residents from West Baltimore will be one of the 10 startup recipients of the $50,000 awards that are available?” The Baltimore Housing Roundtable, a coalition of community development organizations, was blunt in its assessment that too much of Baltimore’s development had been based on a trickle down theory. “We believe that the incoming tide of development can lift all boats only if it is principled and based on human rights values,” its September 2015 report asserted. Dubbed the 20/20 Vision for Fair Development—$20 million in public bonds annually committed for community-based jobs to deconstruct and green vacant houses, and $20 million for permanently affordable housing—the Roundtable favored new devices for empowerment in the form of community land trusts, along lines pioneered in Philadelphia and Cleveland.37
The Housing Roundtable report had not come out of the blue. For more than a decade, area organizers had sought to secure a living wage for temporary workers whose income was so insufficient they had to seek refuge in homeless shelters. Considering themselves a human rights organization, members nonetheless assumed the name United Workers in 2002. In 2007, they had their first success, after threatening a hunger strike on behalf of temporary workers employed at the Camden Yards ballpark, in securing a hike in wages from $3.50 to $11.30 an hour. The following year the organization petitioned the current owner of Rouse’s Harborplace, General Growth Properties, to increase wages for temporary workers, backing their demands with an extended report, Hidden in Plain Sight, which detailed such abuses as wage theft and erratic scheduling. The effort nonetheless failed to secure concessions. Seeking more leverage in its advocacy efforts, United Workers partnered with UNITE NOW, the union representing hospitality staff, in a broadened campaign for quality jobs, affordable housing, and fair development.38
The 20/20 report, which drew widened support from a number of community and academic organizations, was drafted primarily by Peter Sabonis, a former Maryland Legal Aid attorney who subsequently worked with the National Economic and Social Rights Initiative. The report represented not just a response to Gray’s death but the end product of collective organizing. In a Baltimore Sun opinion piece, coauthored by Sabonis and Workers United lead organizer Todd Cherkis, they pointed to $558 million in municipal bond spending over the previous eleven years, on top of millions in tax increment financing and other abatements and exceptions intended to lure business investment, and argued for a more directed program for putting underemployed residents to work in the reconstruction of abandoned homes and their adoption as affordable places to live. Sandtown, they asserted, had not been a failure overall, but it never produced the jobs that could sustain a community, leaving residents instead with an undesirable mix of inadequate training and hyperpolicing. Calling for an annual tax expenditure report showing the amount of revenue given away and its return, they also asked for an annual needs assessment of city residents and a commitment to aim funds in their direction.39
As part of the effort to secure its goals, the Housing Roundtable launched a petition campaign to put the creation of an affordable housing trust fund on the ballot for the fall 2017 election. After securing close to twice the number of necessary signatures, the initiative passed with over 80 percent approval. The city council, however, stalled implementation of the program as it fielded objections from developers who complained about the prospect of additional fees from real estate transactions. When the mayor failed to press council for action, members of United Workers disrupted a March 2018 council meeting as they demanded action on the ballot initiative. Referring to their 20/20 campaign, advocates for the measure claimed that $20 million in funding annually over ten years would create or preserve 4,120 permanently affordable housing opportunities; rehabilitate 1,596 vacant properties; and support 6 community land trusts. In August, the mayor and city council finally came to agreement on levying excise taxes on the transfer and the recording taxes on real estate sales exceeding $1 million. In addition to the $13 million a year the tax was expected to generate, the mayor pledged to allocate between $2 million and $7 million annually that, by fiscal 2023, would provide the total of $20 million a year to the trust that activists were demanding. It was a rare victory for activists, but welcome as the new trust fund was, they reacted angrily to the mayor’s decision to direct an unanticipated $21 million in excess real estate tax payments to pay police overtime instead of using the money to jump-start the fund.40
The following fall, Baltimore residents struck an additional blow for public-sector services by making the city the first in the United States to ban privatization of its drinking water and sewer systems. A companion election measure to establish an “equity fund,” an unspecified amount of money that could be used to overcome racial and other kinds of discrimination, also passed.41 Even as that happened, however, the city advanced plans to privatize a good portion of its public housing stock. Overwhelmed with demands for repair, the Baltimore Housing Authority sought to take advantage of HUD’s Rental Assistance Demonstration program, authorizing the sale of public housing to private investors, who would be eligible for tax credits in return for making repairs or redeveloping the complexes. In Baltimore, authorities first authorized the sale of 22 of the city’s 38 public housing developments in 2014. In 2018, the city added the Gilmor Homes to the list of complexes slated for sale, some 4,500 units, more than 40 percent of the city’s entire stock. As a preliminary step, it designated 6 buildings in the sprawling complex for demolition, including the buildings on Butler Court where Freddie Gray had been arrested three years earlier. Despite fears expressed by residents that demolition was but a prelude to gentrification, public officials representing the area justified the action as both necessary to combat crime and desirable to add green space for the complex. With 25,000 people already on the waiting list for public housing, activists were quick to point out the difficulties of finding adequate alternative housing for those displaced.42
On the other side of the city, officials authorized the demolition of another major public housing complex, Perkins Homes. One of four such facilities originally located near the Johns Hopkins medical complex, Perkins was the next to last slated for conversion to mixed-use and mixed-income development. Rebranded as Perkins Summerset Oldtown, the revitalized seventeen-acre area was expected to combine New Urbanist physical design with a commitment to social equity. Existing residents feared the effects of gentrification and further displacement, however, not the least when the city awarded development rights to Michael Beatty, who had made his reputation as the master builder of the billion-dollar conversion of a nearby industrial portion of the waterfront into the upscale Harbor Point. With the contract as well to redevelop the failing Old Town Mall, located on Gay Street at the heart of the historically Black neighborhood, Beatty was in a position to finally connect the redevelopment of Baltimore’s waterfront with the community development efforts spurred by Johns Hopkins.43 Beatty assured critics he was committed to working within the spirit of the 2010 master plan for Old Town, prepared by Pittsburgh-based Urban Design Associates. Declaring that “development of human capital must be as robust as development of vacant land if existing and new employers are to be retained and attracted to the area,” the plan promised a three-pronged approach for sustainable development that included environmental protection, economic prosperity, and social equity.44 In its call for a range of social services, for employment, for adequate health care, and for access to affordable housing, the plan echoed Rouse’s transformation initiative in Sandtown-Winchester. Still, housing advocates worried about the fate of area tenants, a concern confirmed only days after the Perkins contract was awarded when the Baltimore Housing Authority closed further applications, citing a backlog of 14,000 requests for housing.45
The major new redevelopment story in Baltimore, however, of a magnitude rivaling that which had revitalized the Inner Harbor, was the proposed conversion of a largely abandoned industrial Port Covington site at the mouth of the Patapsco River where it enters the Inner Harbor, a hugely ambitious plan driven by Under Armour founder and CEO Kevin Plank. Launched out of the basement of Plank’s grandmother’s home in the Georgetown neighborhood of Washington, D.C., in 1996, Under Armour by 2015 had surpassed Adidas as the second-largest sportswear company in the United States. Plank was impressed by the mark Dan Gilbert was making through the expansion of his real estate interests in downtown Detroit, and with the Under Armour headquarters located since 1998 at Locust Point in the heart of Baltimore’s downtown, Plank sought to expand nearby. Failing to secure the parcel he had targeted, however, he started to quietly buy up land in Port Covington. The effort coincided with the civil disturbances that followed Freddie Gray’s death. Disturbed by news coverage that made it seem that the city was engulfed by violence when most of it was unscathed, Plank told a reporter for Bloomberg Businessweek, “That wasn’t us.” Realizing he could make a difference when there weren’t “a lot of people doing stuff here,” he continued, “I can use the heat and momentum [of Under Armour] and, frankly, my balance sheet to get things started and keep things moving.”46 The result was an audacious proposal: a new four-million-square-foot headquarters for his company as an anchor for a whole new neighborhood encompassing within its 236 acres 7,500 residential units, 1.5 million square feet of entertainment and retail space, and 40 acres of parks.
Plank spent some $100 million of his own money securing properties to assemble the site. To complete the roughly $5.5 billion project, he sought another $1.1 billion in local, state, and federal funding, the central element of which would be $535 million in tax increment financing—to be raised through city-issued thirty-year bonds and paid back over a forty-year period. Additional costs to the public were another $1 billion in interest on the bonds and $735 million in tax credits. Although eventual tax revenues in return were estimated at $1.8 billion, the bulk of those returns, even assuming complete development, would not be available until after 2045.47 As the largest tax increment financing project in Baltimore history, the plan was contested by multiple community organizations, which argued that both the costs of such a project and the devotion of tax revenues at the site to repayment for its costs would severely compromise city finances and further deepen the existing city divide.
Some eight hundred people showed up at the Baltimore City Council’s first public hearing on the proposed tax increment plan in July 2016, where Reverend Glenna Huber, an Episcopal priest and clergy cochair of BUILD, brought the audience to its feet several times as she recited the long trail of broken development promises that she said had created two Baltimores: desperately poor residents throughout the city and wealthy, subsidized enclaves around the harbor. “It’s hard to trust when you have been played so often,” she shouted. Drawing on Under Armour’s marketing slogan, “We protect this house,” she declared that the people of Baltimore would protect their house from a project that as proposed would only expand the city’s deep divides. An associated opinion essay in the Baltimore Sun chastised lawmakers for embracing “the structural inequity of Baltimore’s development process” and called for the addition of an Under Armour factory or warehouse in or near West Baltimore to create middle-wage jobs for workers in communities like Sandtown and Harlem Park. Subsequent news reports added further criticism of a deal that allowed developers to circumvent prevailing laws for inclusionary housing and employment of minorities. “A lot of people were upset and frustrated, including myself, that one year after the death of Freddie Gray and all we’ve seen in the aftermath, following the decades of disinvestment in Black and Brown neighborhoods, city leaders would respond by offering $660 million to one man, Kevin Plank, and his personal project,” Charly Carter, executive director of Maryland Working Families, declared. “It is poor communities—white, too, but mostly Black and Brown—subsidizing rich developers while our neighborhoods are left to fall apart. It’s the new Jim Crow.”48
After suspending a vote at the initial hearing, the city council over the next few months secured concessions from Plank’s Sagamore Development Company in the form of community benefits deemed generous enough to gain the support of most if not all of the project’s critics. For a coalition of six adjoining neighborhoods, the company agreed to raise up to $20 million over the next ten years to support the construction of new community facilities, including a business incubator, a library, a community center, and athletic fields. Among the beneficiaries was the neighborhood of Cherry Hill, where a public housing complex had been built in the 1940s for Black migrants arriving from the South. According to Michael Middleton, director of the Cherry Hill Development Corporation and a spokesman for the coalition, funding would finally bring to fruition plans for building neighborhood capacity that had been brewing for years. “We’ve had all these grandiose ideas,” he reported. “Now we have resources to implement those plans … the thing that most community development organizations don’t have.”49 Sagamore followed several months later with another $135 million in concessions, setting aside $25 million for workforce development to train and hire local residents, $10 million in loans for minority- and women-owned businesses, and more than $7.5 million for school and summer programs. As part of the agreement, the company doubled the number of residential units it agreed to set aside at below-market rates to 20 percent and agreed to hire 51 percent of its construction workers with Baltimore residences, concessions that had been pressed especially by BUILD.50
Such efforts to tap the product of new investment for the benefit of struggling families in blighted neighborhoods lifted some spirits but far from ensured a renaissance for the city as a whole. As an independent assessment of the proposed Port Covington development commissioned by BUILD pointed out, the city’s due diligence curiously lacked any market assessment for the new project. Every assumption that newly built homes would fill up was matched with the prospect that success, if it came, would pull resources from other parts of the city. Further analysis showed that provisions of the affordable housing agreement relieved Sagamore of its full obligation if, for instance, not enough housing vouchers could be obtained from the Department of Housing and Urban Development, a distinct possibility in a Trump administration.51 Then, cementing those concerns, the city authorized Plank to take the lead in preparing an application to secure the location of a second North American headquarters for Amazon, making the case that his own project at Port Covington was shovel-ready for the fifty thousand employees Amazon wanted to locate. Seeking investment that might more directly help the city’s most beleaguered residents, the Old Goucher Neighborhood Association submitted an alternative proposal arguing for a more central Baltimore location. Baltimore mayor Catherine Pugh described their effort as laughable and endorsed the Port Covington proposal in gushing terms.52 Although other locations in Maryland submitted proposals to Amazon, Maryland governor Larry Hogan said he would personally lobby Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos to bring the company to Port Covington as well as provide a package of financial incentives he described as “mind-boggling” and the largest in state history “by a long shot.” Such promises were not enough, as Amazon failed to include Baltimore among its twenty finalists.53
Plank shrugged off the rebuff, assuring supporters that the project remained on track. Following a sharp drop in Under Armour’s stock and slowing sales in 2017, however, progress on Port Covington lagged. But then, Plank got a break: the whole development project was included in a designated opportunity zone under the program introduced under the Trump administration’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act of 2017 intended to draw new investment to poor areas around the country. Port Covington was neither poor nor originally on the list of census tracts designated by Governor Hogan for eligibility. Even a direct request of the governor from a Port Covington development team seemed to have failed, but three weeks later, according to an investigation conducted by ProPublica, Hogan added the site to a revised list, using a tortured justification that it qualified by overlapping by a sliver with an adjacent area designated as an enterprise zone established under the Clinton administration. Although based on a technical error due to the misaligning of two existing maps, the designation made the site eligible for additional tax benefits, which could reach as much as 25 percent of investment, even though less than 0.3 percent of the property overlapped with the neighboring tract. “The very thing that made Port Covington a poor candidate to be an opportunity zone—that it wasn’t a low-income area—could make it exceptionally attractive to investors,” ProPublica concluded. Indeed, shortly afterward, Plank convened an opportunity zone conference that drew state officials as well as executives from Goldman, Deloitte, and other investment firms.54 A subsequent groundbreaking at the site drew extensive praise not just from city officials but also from a BUILD representative, doubtless pleased with promises to hire local construction workers. Observers could not forget, however, the continuing tension between chasing capital investment and investing in human capital. As Morgan State’s Lawrence Brown told one news outlet, Baltimore’s subsidies would only continue a “long legacy of racial hypersegregation and intense poverty concentration” in one of America’s poorest cities. “It will exacerbate current economic inequality and allow Sagamore Development Corporation and Under Armour to reap the windfall of a tremendous public subsidy while redlined Black neighborhoods will continue to languish due to a city government that continues to cater to corporate developers.”55
Not incidentally, the Baltimore Sun made a related point. Regretting the news that the public housing authority had closed applications for its dwindling number of units, the paper tried to project a ray of light by commending the recently opened Metro Heights at Mondawmin apartment house. An award-winning project for its access to public transit and affordable rates due to subsidies generated through Rouse’s successor Enterprise Homes company, the complex offered many of the amenities featured in upscale apartments aimed at millennials, including game rooms, bike racks, and a fitness center. As much as it might have reflected Rouse’s best ideals, however, the complex remained the exception in troubled neighborhoods like Mondawmin. Noting that the seventy-unit complex was “but a drop in the bucket” in meeting the need, the Sun described the moment as a wake-up call, which if unanswered could soon trade an affordable housing crisis for a homeless epidemic.56 This was the state of Baltimore more than twenty-five years after Rouse had placed such high hopes in Sandtown. If the former effort failed Freddie Gray, Baltimore’s mixed recent history of favoring new investment even as it struggled to meet critical social needs remained to haunt those who survived Freddie’s fate.